The Most Wanted (4 page)

I sighed. Ordinarily, I started interviews with a stab at outlining goals: Why were we here together? What had happened and what was needed? But for some reason I found myself eager that day to influence a situation I knew very well was none of my business.

And so I asked Arley, “What possessed you to do this thing? What possessed your mom to sign for it? Was he your boyfriend before he went in?”

Arley shook her head. “I didn’t have a boyfriend before him. I just got to know him through the letters.”

“Three months ago.”

“Three months.” She squared her shoulders then and said, “He’s really good.” And I knew what she meant—good in the sense that applies to a child, or to a nun. “I know what I’m doing. I might only be fifteen—”

“You’re fourteen.”

“Okay, but I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing when it comes to this. My husband—Dillon—has a clean record for his . . . incarceration, and he really should be out in less than two years. It’s all right there.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Ma’am,” said Arley, coloring deeply, “he needs me to be with him before that.” I could tell it was killing her to do this, and I felt like a shit. She would not have said any of this for worlds, except that Dillon mattered more to her than her sense of decency. I didn’t realize then what an exaggerated sense that was, or why, though I would come to see that Arley’s decency was exactly like her skein of heavy hair—equal parts discomfort and joy.

“He wants a conjugal visit,” I suggested.

“And I do too.”

“It’s been denied.”

“Yep.”

“You want to have sex with him.”

“I want to . . . be close to him.”

I put my face in my hands. “Well, Missus LeGrande, unless there is something that you are not telling me, unless there is something I learn about your husband that you have not told me: for example, that his record suggests that he constitutes a risk to your health or well-being”—beyond the obvious, I thought—“or a risk to the security of Solamente River Prison, your request and his petition together should work. Now, your responsibility—”

“I can pay. . . .”

I sighed. “Well, you pay what you can pay. We generally work those things out fairly well. But what I was going to say was, your responsibility is to tell me the truth and give me some patience while I try to work this out without litigation—that is, without having to—”

“Without going to court.”

“Exactly. Because I think that would be best for everyone involved, including you and your husband and the state of Texas and, God knows, me.”

“Well, I can be patient.”

I hope so, I nearly said, looking at her and thinking, You haven’t been a bit patient so far; why can’t you be patient enough to grow your last inch or two before you load all this on? I wanted to say, Kid, this barge is never going to get any lighter, and it will only sink lower in the water, no matter how fast you pole or bail. But there was something in her gaze, a kind of pleading, that suggested she already understood everything—the sorry way this looked, the inappropriateness of her claim, the risk of shame—about this thing she’d launched, and that it was beyond her, entirely beyond her, to correct the path of flight.

And I sensed what I would later know: that Arley needed no help from me at experiencing guilt or regret. That she’d seen the world as mostly a place of recklessness all her young life. I’d learn that she had created a plan on paper, her Book of Life Goals, out of fear of growing up the way she’d been raised—that is, recklessly—and that, much as she loved Dillon, it hurt to see her carefully written entries on sports and clothes and manners become so many sticks and ladders, marks in rainbow ink, meaningless as bird tracks.

As we stood up, I managed to avoid the impulse to pat her shoulder. Suddenly she pointed to the purple folder she carried and said, “I’m going to leave this with you all now. But there’s just one thing.”

I sighed. “What?”

“In our letters. In here. You’ll see that I lied at first. I said I was older.”

“I see. But he knows now? Everything?”

“Yes, ma’am. Everything. And he doesn’t mind.” I looked at the lean curve of Arley’s waist and thought, I’ll bet he doesn’t, I’ll just bet he doesn’t one bit, but all I said was, “Well. Then it’s no problem for me, I suppose.”

I watched her close the door behind her, and said to myself, Well, we will just have to find a way for this girl to land as softly as possible. Then I sat down with my cold coffee, to read the “evidence” in her purple folder, which she’d labeled in filigreed sticker letters, “Dillon and Arlington LeGrande.”

I
USED TO THINK
none of this would have happened if I’d been raised normal. But maybe it doesn’t change everything. Once I met a girl who grew up in a rich family in Dallas—her father was even a doctor—and she told me that in high school she was drunk every day; she drank milk and Scotch out of a thermos every morning. It had to be her parents’ fault, but I couldn’t see how. She told me they did everything for her.

The way I see it, everything came out of me getting the job at Taco Haven. It was my first step. The way it worked was, Elena talked her mom into letting her get a part-time job. She told her mother it would make her “more responsible,” even though she didn’t even know whether she could find a job at that point! Then Elena went over to see Ginny Jack, the owner of Taco Haven (which was just across the street from our school, where Alamo Heights merges into San Antonio). She convinced Ginny that the two of us should work there, and that we should work the same hours—which she told Ginny was for safety but was really just so that we could goof around and be together. Then I had to talk my mama into letting me take the job. Which was not easy, but I was pretty set on it.

It was going to be part of my master plan, anyhow, a way to save money for college or for moving out on my own. Some teachers were starting to say I could get a scholarship.

Mama just said forget it. No way was I working Saturdays. She told me it was because she didn’t like me hanging around with Elena, not because of why you would think—that Elena was a little wild—but because Mr. G. had his own construction business and all. She didn’t want me getting ideas about what I should have or not have, I guess, but she acted like it was because the Gutierrezes were Hispanic and we were somehow better than them, which is a big laugh. We didn’t have much room to talk about social class. City people would have called us hillbillies or worse, though there are no hills right around where I lived.

Well, I said I still wanted a job, because then I could pay for my own clothes. Mama said she’d think about it. Of course, she came right up with another objection. One night, she waited up to see me, even though it was a lot of trouble for her, being as how her shift started at six and she usually worked until five the next day and didn’t get home until seven. “No way are you leaving this house on Saturday,” she said. “Any Saturday. That’s your day to get your work done here. I can’t work these kinds of hours without you take care of this house, see?
That’s
your job. That’s your keep.” I wanted to defy her. But I knew she would give me up as incorrigible. Lots of mothers said to girls they’d give them up to the state if they didn’t behave, but they didn’t mean it. Mama truly did.

I did sass her, sort of, one of the only times in my life I ever said anything back to her. I said, “So it isn’t really about Elena’s family.”

“Well, I don’t really care if they adopt you,” she told me. “If they’re so successful, they could use another kid.”

Elena’s mother actually did treat me like another kid in the family. And she was happy when Elena and me started being best friends. We’d always kind of known each other. But then, in eighth grade, Elena cheated off me in a math test, and when I caught her, she started to cry. That surprised me, because I always thought of her as so tough. So when the teacher noticed how good her grade was, I lied and said she didn’t look. Elena said that was the most loyal thing she ever saw anybody do.

When we got the job, Mrs. Gutierrez said, “Well, at least Arley can be a good influence on you, Elena, and you can do like she does. She doesn’t have half of what you have, and you look how hard she works.” That embarrassed me, but you know, I was secretly kind of proud of it, and when I started hanging out at their house more, I would sort of leave my book reports around, so Mrs. G. would see how neat they were labeled and typed and decorated. I even kind of liked it when she said that I would end up a doctor or a lawyer and Elena would be, like, selling earrings at the mall.

“No way, Ma,” Elena would pipe up. “I want to be a nude dancer. You know that.”

Mrs. G. would mutter swear words or prayers in Spanish and go in the kitchen to get chips for us. The best thing about working, for Elena, was getting her mom off her case.

“She’s such a royal bitch,” Elena would say. But Mrs. Gutierrez wasn’t a bitch at all. Elena just didn’t know there were mothers who wouldn’t even know what year of school you were in. When Mrs. G. would go, “Did you study for your English test, Elena Louise?” she thought it was a way of controlling her. To me, it was like tucking her in at night, or something, and when I would stay over on Saturday nights after Elena and me went to the movies at the mall, and her mom started nagging me, too, about how I would wreck my complexion eating so much grease or whatever, I totally loved it. I would even show her my report card, and she would make me promise I would never waste that good mind on just being a housewife, like her. “Go on,” she would tell me. “Say, ‘I promise, Luisa.’ ” I couldn’t really call her Luisa, though, but I did, sometimes, quietly call her “Ma.” The way Mrs. G. must have felt about me at first, about what I did, was one of the things that hurt the most. They had one of those big, close Hispanic families, where they watch out for the girls like they were made of cake sugar that would melt in the rain. Not that this had much effect on Elena’s oldest sister, Gracie. Connie was the nice sister, but Grace was a desperado, who’d once even spent a few months at the Evins Center in Edinburg after she refused to go to school so many times Mr. and Mrs. G. had to call the authorities. Connie, on the other hand, was in college now, at Midtown Tech. I never even thought too much about college before Elena’s mom started saying how different I was from other girls my age. How serious. It made me think maybe my life was more than just a thing Mama could do with whatever she wanted.

The way it turned out, though, Mrs. Gutierrez wouldn’t let Elena work Saturdays, either. She thought Elena needed at least one whole day for rest and homework. So we agreed with Ginny that we’d just work Tuesdays and Thursdays after school and afternoons on Sunday. Mama was just about to say no to that, too, but then Elena had this great idea: She said, why didn’t I offer Mama some money every week? So I did. And Mama said okay, twenty bucks. I said no, ten. She said at least that was enough for smokes, so fine.

That’s what finally did it. And it’s a good example of what’s so good about Elena. I can look at a chemistry problem and “see” it right away; but I can’t see through people the way Elena can.

Taco Haven was no great shakes. Elena’s sister Grace called it “Restaurante Cucaracha,” but it wasn’t all that dirty. We had fun there, and we felt grown up, getting a check every week with our names printed on it, even if the check was only for sixty dollars.

What if Mama had really put her foot down? Or what if we’d applied to be baggers at Oberly’s or The Supershop? There must have been a master plan even bigger than mine. Annie says, “Everything is chance. People just believe in fate so they can think they’re not to blame.”

But even Annie goes out the door backward if she forgets her list or her keys and has to go back in. She tosses salt and makes
pufft-pufft
noises with her lips when someone talks about a tragedy. She insists that’s not superstition, that it’s Jewish voodoo. “Inherited insanity,” she calls it. She never used to know how ideas like those would seize hold of me, such as that a child could be born looking perfect, with bad genes wriggling inside.

Early that Sunday at Taco Haven, I was thinking about boys, but not about having babies with one. I was thinking how weird I was, compared with other girls, for not having a boy in my Book of Life Goals. But the way Mama was about men—the way she went all dreamy over the doctors’ hands at the hospital where she worked, and the way she used to bring home salesmen and cowboys about once a month, who drank all our orange juice from the carton—that and the big-haired girls my brother Cam had in his room all night, who came out smeary and smelling . . . none of these things exactly made me feel like having a crush. Back in seventh grade, every girl was wearing one of those red stickpins you got at Rangers games to show she had a boy. But I didn’t even want one. Even as a high-school freshman, when everybody would ask who I was going out with, I would just smile. Elena said I had a mysterious smile and that I would make them all think I was going out with a college boy. But it was scary to me, scary like the time back in kindergarten when the kids locked the teacher out of the room and everybody laughed but me, and I got scared and took so many deep breaths I passed out.

At sleepovers, Elena and this other girl she was friends with for a while, Chita, would tell me all about how it felt to have a boy’s tongue in your mouth. It felt like a live animal, they said, separated from the person, and at first it was sickening, but then it got to feel weird if you kissed and you didn’t do it. And the way they would try to touch your top with their wrists instead of their hands so that they could act like it was an accident. Elena had made out from the waist up with three or four boys. And one touched her between her legs outside her pants. She said she liked it. The feelings made her wiggle. I’d say, “It sounds amazing.” But I thought, what if he had mustard just before? What if I gagged? But I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t even see why a hot girl like Elena would want anything to do with a string bean like me, her with her little gymnast’s body, calves that looked like she was always wearing heels, and her big red smile like Halloween wax lips. When we went out, boys would howl at her like coyotes in the hills; I was Elena’s shadow.

That was before Dillon, of course. After that, being a real woman, in a physical way, seemed so easy. I was as good at it as I was at hurdles—a natural. I was beautiful from his first word to me, long before he ever touched me. I know that sounds silly.

That day in September, it was so hot outside that every time someone opened the door, the air would lick into Taco Haven like gas off a charcoal grill, and you’d start to sweat instantly. They lie about Texas heat when they say it’s dry and you don’t feel so bad. What it’s really like is so humid sometimes and so dry others that you feel like you got up in the morning and, first thing you went out, you were wetted down and rolled in flour like a tortilla. That day, whenever I wasn’t waiting on somebody, I stayed in the back, next to the freezer. I could count on my hands the times I’d ever been cold in my life. In fact, I never had but one blue-jean jacket until Annie bought me that green trench coat to wear to court.

I was waiting on a table of college kids, two girls and two boys, when Elena’s big sister Connie came in. I tell you I almost dropped my pencil, she looked so unusual. The girls and the boys shut up too, and for a minute, the only sound in the whole place came from the old skinny man, Mr. Justice, who was always hanging around by school. He was singing along to Patsy Cline on the jukebox and fiddling on the fiddle no one could see but him. I’d been worried about Mr. Justice, because Ginny Jack said I had to throw him out after a third cup of coffee or he’d sit there all day, so half my mind was on that problem and half on trying to memorize the way the college girls had braided up their hair in back with ribbons.

But Connie made me forget everything.

“Jesus Christ,” Elena said to her sister. “You look like you been embalmed.” Elena is so smart sometimes. That was just how Connie did look: she was pale and smooth as a mannequin in Dalton’s window, and she looked somehow assembled, like from separate parts—a cheek, an eyebrow, a lip.